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Etymologies

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Examples

For decades, the interest rate on American debt has been known as the "risk-free rate", because a US default was as close to impossible as anyone in financial markets could imagine, and all other bonds were priced relative to America's.

While governments grapple with ballooning debt and banks manage exposure to ailing sovereign assets, once classified as risk-free, so corporations await the dearth of funding that will inevitably result from the latest bout of global economic uncertainty.

The pension payments are essentially risk-free - the government is in many cases required by law to make the - so they argue that the appropriate discount rate is the so-called risk-free rate, the rate on Treasury bonds, considered one of the safest investments, which is currently between 4 and 5 percent.

Since we all watched the disaster unfold day after day, the blowup of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was supposed to have snapped the country and industry out of what Michael Bromwich -- the man put in charge of offshore drilling after the spill -- last week called a collective trance'' that allowed the industry, government and the public to believe that drilling was risk-free.